You’ll quickly discover that buying, installing, and setting up a smart home becomes super addicting! There are just so many cool things you can add to your living space to make your life better and easier. Today we’ll cover some smart home accessories that you can add into the mix.

Wifi Extender & Security

As we discussed, getting the proper router makes all the difference in the world when you have so many devices sending packets along your network at the same time. If you live in a larger home, then you should also consider getting a WiFi range extender.

With a WiFi extender, you can boost the signal across your entire house. It also comes in handy if you have a wireless security camera setup in a location far away from your WiFi router. (We’ll discuss security cameras a bit later in this article).

WiFi security is also a big concern when you start plugging your household electronics into the net. Be sure to lock down your network and continue to update your router and any smart home product that you have installed.

Hackers have had a field day with unsecured smart home devices. Recruiting them into bot networks and creating all around havoc with weak security. Be diligent and don’t let this happen to you.

Fun With Smart Plugs

Smart plugs are a great way to get started with home automation and can form the backbone of all the ways in which you automatize your home. At its simplest you can turn on and off a lamp, but there are many more interesting and fun things you can do.

For starters, if you have a Fitbit, you can plug in an old coffee maker and when your Fitbit registers that you’re awake it will start the coffee. Make sure you have an old coffee maker for this trick because the smart plug can’t turn on any device with any kind of complicated electronics.

You can also set up geo fencing where the plug recognizes when your smartphone comes within range and turns the plug either on or off. This comes in handy if you want the living room light to turn on when you get home. Also, if you regularly forget to turn off space heater or curling iron, it will turn these items off automatically when you leave the house.

Colored Lights and Light Strips

Colored lights and strips add a cool factor to your home and with the millions of colors and shades, you can accent any room in awesome.The two main competitors in this space are Lifx and Philips Hue. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Lifx is brighter and has a larger color range. It also doesn’t require a separate hub that needs to be plugged into your network.

While Phillips does have a hub, which is one more device to worry about, having a hub creates a more reliable network connection so you don’t have to worry about your lights going offline so often.

Battle of the Smart Thermostats

Speaking of competitors, there are two main rivals in the smart home thermostat arena. Nest and Ecobee. If I were to sum it up I would simply say, Ecobee is better, but let me explain a bit more about my position.

While Nest wasn’t the first smart thermostat, they definitely popularized the category. Nest is a beautiful product that looks fantastic and feels elegant to the touch. It is smart in the fact that you can set the temp from your smartphone or echo device.

You can also run routines like “when the temperature outside is 40 degrees then turn on the heater”. Ecobee can do all of those things too but it has one killer feature that puts it so far ahead of Nest that in the long run, it is going to capture the market.

And what is that?.... Room sensors.

Ecobee comes with remote room sensors that read the temperature in every room and detects if you or someone in your family is in that room. It then adjusts the temperature accordingly. This solves a huge problem.

Have you ever been in your room at night and you are burning up because your HVAC system is reading the temperature in the living room which is wide and open. With the Ecobee, if no one is in the living room and your room hits 70 degrees it will turn off.

That's a game changer!

Home Security

You can go all out with a smart security system and spend thousands of dollars on expensive monitoring contracts. If you want ultimate security and don’t want to have to think about it, I would definitely go that route.

If you want something simple or are just looking for a bit of a starter kit, then I have 2 products you should consider.

Ring and Arlo.

Ring is a doorbell camera that has some really cool smart home functionality. You can configure it to work with a smart light so that when it recognizes that someone is at the door, the light will flip on.

It’s also an intercom that runs over the net so if you’re not home you can communicate with whoever is at the door. This gives the impression that you are home so if a would be burglar is checking up on your house, you can potentially scare them away.

Arlo is a completely wireless security camera that you can put literally anywhere. Because of its WiFi connection, this little camera is very versatile and can even be positioned on the ground or hidden in a bush.

The one criticism is that since it is run on batteries, you will have to change them every so often but that's a minor inconvenience for the ability to not have to wire these things up.

Final Thoughts

There are many, many more things you can add and install into your smart home and with the backing of major companies like Amazon promoting smart home tech, it’s only going to grow.

Keep an eye on this space, it’s going to change the way we do everything.